![]() ![]() “Diana was usually in a lot better mood when she left than she was when she arrived,” one of the Queen’s staff recalled. AFP // Getty Images How did the Queen react to Charles and Diana's split?Īs the pressures of her high profile and troubled marriage began to get to Diana, she felt “extremely isolated” by the royal family, who “continuously misunderstood” her, according to a letter she wrote to her friend Dudley Poplak in 1991.Īlthough there's no reports of a scene quite as brutal as the one The Crown depicts, Seward writes that Diana would appear unannounced at the palace as her marriage crumbled: At first, the Queen took a tolerant view of these unscheduled visits. It was her first solo overseas trip as a representative of the royal family, and she won praise for her “dignified manner at the highly charged and at times mawkish funeral service,” per Morton.ĭiana attends Princess Grace of Monaco’s funeral on September 18, 1982. Though Diana was still new to her royal role and just 21 years old at the time, the queen was right to trust her. “I went to the queen and I said, 'You know, I’d like to do this,' and she said 'I don’t see why not. ![]() “I went to her private secretary, who was then Philip Moore, who said that he didn’t think it would be possible because I’d only been in the job three or four months,” Diana recalled to Morton. Diana had encountered Grace at a gala the previous year and the two had bonded, so she went to Charles and asked if it would be possible for her to represent the queen at Grace's funeral.Īccording to Morton, both Charles and palace staff told her it was unlikely she would be allowed to go. In 1982, shortly after Charles and Diana were married, Grace Kelly-aka Grace, Princess of Monaco-died. She kept the formal obsequies-dropping a deep curtsy each time they met-but otherwise kept her distance.” The queen entrusted Diana with representing her at royal events very early. In the early days, Diana was quite simply terrified of her mother-in-law. “However,” Morton writes, “it was governed by the fact that she was married to her older son and a future Monarch. In a letter written shortly after the couple's engagement announcement, the queen notes, “I trust that Diana will find living here less of a burden than is expected.” Instead, the soon-to-be princess struggled with bulimia and loneliness in the months leading up to her wedding.Īccording to Andrew Morton's 1992 biography, Diana: Her True Story-In Her Own Words, Diana's relationship with the queen was friendly-at least in comparison to her relationship with the Queen Mother, who kept her at arm's length. Diana had already met the queen before she began dating her son, and royal biographer Ingrid Seward wrote in 2001 that as the couple's relationship blossomed, the queen “never directly addressed the question of his marriage, but by nod and nuance, she made it clear she approved of Diana.” The monarch also seemed to grossly overestimate Diana's ability to adjust to royal life. The Spencers were an upper-class family with longstanding ties to the royals-Diana's grandmothers were both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother-so Diana and her sisters grew up in the same circles as Charles and his siblings. ![]()
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